Hello everyone! Even if it may not look like it from the outside, quite a few small things are finally starting to come together! First of course, there’s the new Whimsical Witch class, which is slowly but surely taking shape, but also the upcoming console release of the game. We’ve received updates regarding the port: development is progressing well and it should arrive sometime this year. It’s honestly a bit of a dream come true to have our game released physically, and seeing prototype box arts for the Switch and PS5 versions is incredibly exciting. I talk a bit more about it just below! The Slormancer on Consoles! If you didn’t know already, The Slormancer is planned to release on PS5, Xbox, Switch, and Switch 2 . The port is being handled by a separate team taking care of everything, from code adjustments to store integration and marketing. On our side, we mainly receive updates on their progress. Recently, they sent us a really beautiful presentation for the Deluxe Edition planned for consoles. It should include a copy of the game, stickers, the soundtrack, and even a strategy guide (written by them, which we actually haven’t had the chance to read yet). I don’t think I’m allowed to share the presentation just yet, but if I get the green light soon, I’ll update this Chronicles to include it. It looks really good. Among other things, it features physical editions of the game for both PS5 and Switch. As for the release date, the game should arrive on consoles before the end of the year. Around November if everything goes according to plan, but let’s stay flexible. For Steam Deck players, this will also come with a nice update that should move the game from “Playable” to “Verified” status, as we’re currently reworking several menus to increase font sizes and improve overall readability. Also! For Xbox players, a demo has been available on the store for the past few days. You can check it out here: https://www.xbox.com/fr-fr/games/store/the-slormancer-demo/9NLSPJ7KCPMN If you get the chance to try the demo, don’t hesitate to share your feedback! The Whimsical Witch These are the illustrations for the three Whimsical Witch specializations: The Potion Chef , The Spirit Guide , and The Fortuneteller . I think they look really nice! On the code side, pretty much everything is now in place. The last remaining bits, such as Achievements and the class menu, have been properly implemented. I still need to rework part of the class UI (the combat HUD element that displays the player’s current position within the Balance the Life and Death) to make it more readable, which should keep me busy on Monday. After that, it’ll finally be time for the first full playthrough and the first major internal balance passes. I’m actually pretty excited for the coming week. It’ll be the moment of truth: seeing whether all the systems and mechanics we’ve built truly come together into something cohesive. On the asset side, a few things are still missing. The Witch is particularly demanding because of her many Minions, each requiring multiple animations. After that, we’ll still need to finish the icons and the Reapers. Once all of that is done, we’ll finally be able to move toward a private beta and, of course, a release date. In the meantime, I’ve prepared a selection of screenshots (UI only) revealing a bit more about the class. Please note: the icons are obviously placeholders for now (they’re currently using the Mage icons)! Also, I just found out that Steam supports image carousels, so you can click through the various screenshots! [carousel] [/carousel] a reminder, here’s the full list of the Whimsical Witch’s Skills and Mechanics: Support Skills : Mixture Vortex (The Potion Chef) Spectral Companion (The Spirit Guide) Third Eye (The Fortuneteller) Skills : Scythe Strike Spectral Bat Flight Spectral Toad Explosion Flask of Last Breath Siphon Soul Scythe Flurry Spectral Ancestor Summoning Spectral Spider Swarm Mechanics : Balance of Life and Death Potion Bryan McRipped Infection Soul Stones You should be able to find additional information on all of these mechanics in our previous Slormite Chronicles if you want to dig deeper and investigate! Here in Slormite Chronicles 61 , Slormite Chronicles 60 , Slormite Chronicles 59 and Slormite Chronicles 58 . That’s it for today! Cheers!

One Year Already! After our last Slormite Chronicles , which celebrated 5 years since the Early Access release, and at the same time, 5 years of Slormite Chronicles , it’s now time to celebrate the first anniversary of the game’s 1.0 release , following four years in Early Access. Give or take a month, we spent almost exactly four years in Early Access, at least twice as long as we initially expected. Unlike those Early Access years, where we pushed out as many updates as possible without really taking the time to enjoy things, this past year has been completely different. We actually got to enjoy the release, watching streams, videos, and even players competing for records. All in all, a pretty great year for us. Story Time : A lot of things didn’t go as originally planned, and one of them is that the game wasn’t even supposed to go through an Early Access phase at all. If you’ve been following development for a long time, you’ve probably seen the sheer number of reworks that happened even before Early Access. At one point, we reworked almost everything we had done: Skills, Slorm Reapers, the Ancestral Legacy etc... because the game kept growing in scope, and we felt it lacked depth and richness in several areas. That took time, and forced us to make some tough decisions. (Before/after of a pre–Early Access rework of the Ancestral Legacy.) At some point, the question of the story also came up. Initially, we had planned a much simpler concept centered purely around Expeditions (basically the system currently in the game menu, and nothing more). But, just like everything else, the project kept growing, and we wanted to deliver a more complete experience. And to make a story work, we realized we would need to go through Early Access. Story has never been the game’s strongest point, nor its core focus, but I do think it helped the game appeal to a wider audience. Adding a more developed narrative gave the game a lot of personality, despite its flaws. That said, if we had stuck with a game purely centered around endgame Expeditions, a sort of hybrid between hack’n’slash and roguelite, we probably wouldn’t have needed Early Access at all, and the game’s journey would have been very different. About the Upcoming DLC In a previous Slormite Chronicles , we mentioned wanting to move toward larger expansions rather than smaller DLCs for the future of The Slormancer . However, considering how long it’s taking to develop the Whimsical Witch , the cancellation of the Roguelike Mode we talked about late last year, and the fact that we haven’t released any major update or DLC in a year, we’re likely going to revisit that decision. Right now, we’re considering releasing a DLC focused solely on the new class, alongside a global update that will include bug fixes and a small feature allowing you to change the color of each character’s clothes/armor, and possibly a few additional tweaks if time allows. The Whimsical Witch - Part 729 Just like in the previous Slormite Chronicles, it can be summed up to "we're making progress" and we may very well see the end of it eventually. ːsteamhappyː Here’s where we are: all Skills are now functionally complete on the development side. What remains is a significant amount of asset work, long and repetitive tasks: all the icons, the Slorm Reapers in their Scythe versions, as well as some animations and visual effects for the last skills. Once that’s done, we’ll need to fine-tune and balance everything. Then we’ll move into a closed beta with our trusty testers to fix as many bugs and balance issues as possible. At the same time, we’ll need to send the class for localization into all supported languages. Since this class will be released as a DLC, we’ll also need to prepare the store page, a trailer, screenshots, a description, and translate all of that as well. Nothing particularly complex, nothing we haven’t done before, but altogether, it adds up to quite a lot. Here comes a few New Skill Teasers: Spectral Toad Explosion : A skill that lets you throw a spectral toad that deals damage as it bounces, before eventually exploding after a few jumps. It can be upgraded to unleash swarms of toads, creating explosions everywhere. Like most Witch abilities involving creatures, the toad can also be turned into a minion using the Soul Stone system (see previous Chronicles). Flask of Last Breath : This skill throws a vial that creates a poison pool on the ground, damaging enemies standing in it. The visual inspiration here comes from how Zerg creep spreads in StarCraft. You’ll be able to expand the pool in multiple ways. With certain upgrades, standing in the pool grants you bonuses, and it becomes stronger as it grows larger. Spectral Ancester : This skill summons an ancestor who fights in melee but remains stationary within a targeted area. We wanted to create a hybrid between several mechanics: by default, it acts as an AoE Melee Totem (with its range depending on the AoE size). With upgrades, it can become a moving projectile, start firing projectiles itself and, like other Witch abilities, be turned into a Minion. I’m still missing some screenshots for the latest effects since a few assets aren’t ready yet, but they’ll come soon. Still no release date, as you can see there’s quite a bit left to do, but we’re making progress! About Slormite Chronicles In the comments of the last Slormite Chronicles , we noticed a few people mentioning the lack of content in these posts, saying that we tend to talk a lot without really saying anything, and that things don’t seem to be moving forward. In a way, I completely understand that. I wanted to address it here, because others might feel the same way. It’s true, we’re progressing more slowly than we did during Early Access. Working on the same game for such a long time inevitably brings a certain fatigue, so we’re adjusting our pace to avoid burning out completely. As for the Slormite Chronicles , I think we’ve found a format that works and helps keep the entire community informed about our progress, even when there isn’t much (or any) to report. We could just as well have stopped posting Chronicles over the past six months, and it wouldn’t have made much difference for us. But I’m fairly certain the community prefers knowing what’s going on rather than being left in the dark, speculating and growing frustrated. I understand that it can be frustrating to feel like nothing is moving forward, but this is in no way a sign of disrespect on our part, as I’ve seen suggested. Between saying nothing at all and being transparent month after month about the situation, we made a choice. It may not please everyone, and that’s fair, but it’s the approach we’ve decided to take. That’s it for today! Cheers!

Five Years of Slormite Chronicles! It’s all in the title. The Slormancer was released in Early Access on April 6th, 2021 (five years ago!), and we decided from that point on to publish a Slormite Chronicles every month, on the 6th. Which means we’re now celebrating the 60th (!!!) Slormite Chronicles . That’s no small milestone. If you want to see what the very first Slormite Chronicles looked like, you can check it out here ! We had just launched the game in Early Access, and our emotions were all over the place, thrilled to have reached this milestone, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of feedback and reviews, and slightly desperate about how much work still lay ahead. At the time, the game only had a single Act, two environments, around ten enemies, a hard cap at level 40, a single endgame mode, and about thirty Slorm Reapers. We were still quite far from the final form of the game. And there was also a colossal number of technical issues. Re-reading that first Chronicles, I realized we were announcing our migration from GameMaker Studio 1 to 2, a transition that took me nearly two months. Not exactly ideal right after release. Never Missing a Beat Since then, we’ve never missed a 6th of the month. Some Chronicles have been a bit light on content depending on what we were working on, but I’ve learned the hard way that trying to fill an emptier Chronicles with promises and hype is never a good idea. Sometimes, not much happens and that’s okay. But that is not the case this month. Where We Are Now Since the 1.0 release and the follow-up patches to fix the many remaining bugs, we struggled quite a bit to find the motivation needed to move forward with a proper DLC. After a setback with the Roguelike mode, which turned out to be underwhelming, not really what players expected, and ultimately something we decided to abandon, we shifted our focus to the game’s fourth class: The Whimsical Witch . This meant starting over from scratch on a massive undertaking. We agreed to take our time, work at our own pace, and explore other projects on the side. The problem is: creating a class is a huge task. And when you move slowly on something that big, it often feels like you’re not progressing at all. That makes it very hard to stay motivated, because instead of feeling closer to the finish line… it feels like you’re standing still while still not seeing the end. About ten days ago, we decided to go all-in, so to speak. We paused everything else and focused entirely on finishing this fourth class, pushing as hard and as fast as possible to climb that mountain. And honestly, it feels great. We haven’t produced this many assets and skills in such a short time in a long while, and seeing real progress again has been a huge motivation boost. So… When Is It Coming? To keep it simple: I estimate we’ll finish the development phase of the class within about two weeks (woohoo!). After that, we’ll need to integrate and polish all the assets so everything feels great, followed by a solid round of debugging and balancing. Some effects I coded looked great on paper but turned out to be way too strong, while others are… well, completely useless. Classic Slormancer. Once that’s done, we’ll move into an experimental version to iron out the remaining major issues and continue working on the rest of the upcoming update’s content. As always: no release date until we’re confident about our window. But we’re definitely getting close to something. Here are a few screenshots of the Whimsical Witch’s abilities: The famous Spectral Companion, now with proper assets! Scythe Strike in action. We talked about the Life and Death mechanic in a previous Chronicles: it’s somewhat similar to the Huntress’ Mood system, where you balance effects depending on the bonuses you want. Here, Scythe Strike can be either a Life spell (green) or a Death spell (purple), which changes the bonuses it grants. Scythe Flurry A skill that launches a projectile with numerous upgrades that can drastically alter its behavior, from something akin to a hammerdin to an incredibly slow yet devastating projectile. Siphon Soul The Whimsical Witch can use Soul Stones to transform her Life spells into minions. To do so, she must gather Soul Stones dropped through various abilities. The core skill here is Siphon Soul : a channeled single-target spell (initially) that guarantees Soul Stone generation. Upgrades allow it to chain between enemies, target your own minions to boost their damage, or scale with the number of Soul Stones you have, classic stuff. The skill also scales with the Mana spent since the start of the channel, and includes an upgrade that converts its Mana cost into a percentage of Max Mana instead of a flat cost, making large Mana pools extremely effective. And last but not least (and a first for a class skill): an upgrade that turns Siphon Soul into a toggleable aura, for those who don’t like clicking. What About Consoles?! At the same time, a publisher is handling the console port, which is expected toward the end of the year. Confirmed platforms include PS5, Xbox Series, and both Switch 1 and 2 . We’ve also started receiving prototype box art for a physical edition, which is incredibly exciting for us! We’ll also be leveraging the improvements made for the console port to provide a better experience on the Steam Deck. That’s it for today! See you for the sixty-first. Cheers!

Update on Progress Hello everyone! In case you missed it in the last Slormite Chronicles , we’ve started implementing the new class for The Slormancer directly into the game: The Whimsical Witch . February was largely split between projects unrelated to The Slormancer and a short vacation break. For family reasons, the game's development pace often slows down during school holidays, which was the case in February. That being said, we still managed to make progress on several aspects of the game, particularly on the Whimsical Witch. At this point, I only have two more skills left to implement. The rest are already functioning properly and mainly need a few assets and a good round of polishing. However, the class is still quite far from being finished. We’ll have quite a bit of internal balancing to do before letting a few testers get their hands on it, people who are much more efficient than the two of us when it comes to quickly spotting technical issues and balance problems. The Whimsical Witch, PT.II : Support Skills! After last month’s teaser about the mechanics of the Whimsical Witch, here are a few more details about her Support Skills and Specializations. Brew Vortex The Whimsical Witch’s first Support Skill consists of stirring a cauldron with maximum intensity, so intensely that it creates a vortex around her, dealing continuous damage in the surrounding area. Think of it as a stationary Whirlwind that scales with area damage. Brew Vortex also allows the Witch to automatically gather ingredients for her Potion mechanic while channeling the skill. Certain upgrades will enhance the effects or duration of potions consumed during Brew Vortex. The specialization associated with Brew Vortex is The Potion Chef , which will, among other things, make it easier to gather ingredients and improve all effects related to the Potion system ( see Chronicles 58 ). Spectral Companion Spectral Companion allows the Whimsical Witch to summon one of the three base classes (Knight, Huntress, or Mage) in spectral form to assist her. Each class performs a different attack: Whirlwind for the Knight, an enhanced Arrow Shot for the Huntress, and Rift Nova for the Mage. The Spectral Companion lasts for a few seconds before disappearing and is initially chosen at random from the three classes. With certain upgrades, it will be possible to always summon the same Companion. Another upgrade allows the skill to be cast twice, and a final one lets you summon all three Companions at once. We tried the version with all three Companions active, it's incredible and incredibly fun. 10/10 would recommend. The specialization associated with Spectral Companion is The Spirit Guide , which focuses on improving all of the Whimsical Witch’s minion-related spells and increasing their duration. Through the use of Soulstones , it will allow players to either build a massive army or, on the contrary, maintain a small group of elite minions with unlimited duration. (Above, I'm using Spectral Companion, with non-spectral placeholders) The Third Eye The Third Eye is a toggle skill that allows the Whimsical Witch to place a spectral eye at a targeted location. Once placed, all skills cast by the Whimsical Witch originate from the Third Eye’s location instead of the Witch’s own position. This opens up a wide range of possibilities, such as creating new lines of sight without exposing yourself or casting melee abilities without actually being in close combat. Since we wanted to include some mobility in a Support Skill, one of the first upgrades allows the Witch to swap positions with the Third Eye. We also planned an upgrade that adds a Second Third Eye (yes), which duplicates all the skills cast from the first one. The specialization associated with The Third Eye is The Fortuneteller , which will provide various generic improvements to several of the Whimsical Witch’s mechanics, such as the Infection system or mechanics related to using Bryan McRipped . We are aware that progress on additional content for The Slormancer has been a bit slower than during Early Access. After spending so much time on the game, a bit of fatigue has naturally set in, so we’re allowing ourselves some flexibility to explore other ideas and projects that excite us, some of which could potentially lead to a new game. This helps us avoid burning out completely. Because of this, it’s difficult for us to give a precise release date for upcoming content. We’re likely going to revisit and improve a few elements of the base game and release those changes alongside the new class. We initially hoped to release it around the same time as the console versions, which should arrive sometime this year, but the timelines we’ve received are still too vague to commit to anything yet. That’s all for today. As always, these concepts are subject to change and are much easier to understand in-game than in a Chronicles post. I’m sharing what we currently have, and I hope you like it! Cheers!